Brilliant civic vision

Rick Santorum's empty-headed comments on JFK's speech on the separation of church and state, as well as his dismissal of university education, call to mind John Adams on education:

“Before any great things are accomplished, a memorable change must be made in the system of education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher. The education of a nation instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, must become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.”
That's a private letter, but in his draft of the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Adams writes:
"Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people."

Look Homeward, Angel

Reactions to Thomas Wolfe are severely divided these days.  Elizabeth Hardwick, writing on the occasion of the centennial of his birth in 2000: "He is too much, too many rhapsodies, an inundation.  Not a man you'd want to deal with.  Drunken pages and drunken he often was as he prowled the midnight city.  And yet the mystery of the books is that they are written with a rich, fertile vocabulary, sudden, blooming images, a murderous concentration that will turn everyone he meets into words."
I have always loved Walt Whitman, who if he has written perhaps some of the worst lines of English poetry has also written some of the best.  So I'm well prepared to take on Wolfe's linguistic exuberance and fascination with his own powers of perception.  Knowing his reputation, I expected the repetitiveness, the snobbery, the offhand racism, the inconsistent characterizations masquerading as something more under a load of narrative and descriptive detail (Gant's mother Eliza suffers the most in this respect).
What I didn't expect was the bitter comic self-consciousness that expresses itself in terms of national identity.  Just two examples.  First:

Then, for the first time, he thought of the lonely earth he dwelt on.  Suddenly, it was strange to him that he should read Euripides in the wilderness.
       Around him lay the village; beyond, the ugly rolling land, sparse with cheap farmhouses; beyond all this, America -- more land, more wooden houses, more towns, hard and raw and ugly.  He was reading Euripides, and all around him a world of white and black was eating fried food.  He was reading of ancient sorceriers and old ghosts, but did an old ghost ever come to haunt this land?  The ghost of Hamlet's father, in Connecticut:
        '......I am thy father's spirit,
         Doomed for a certain term to walk the night
         Between Bloomington and Portland, Maine.'
       He felt suddenly the devastating impermanence of the nation.  Only the earth endured -- the gigantic American earth, bearing upon its awful breast a world of flimsy rickets.  Only the earth endured -- this broad terrific earth that had no ghosts to haunt it....  Nothing had been done in stone.  Only this earth endured, upon whose lonely breast he read Euripides.  Within its hills he had been held a prisoner; upon its plain he walked, alone, a stranger.
        O God! O God! We have been an exile in another land and a stranger in our own.  The mountains were our masters: they went home to our eye and our heart before we came to five.  Whatever we can do or say must be forever hillbound.  Our senses have been fed by our terrific land; our blood has learned to run to the imperial pulse of America which, leaving, we can never lose and never forget.  We walked along a road in Cumberland, and stooped, because the sky hung down so low; and when we ran away from London, we went by little rivers in a land just big enough.  And nowhere that we went was far: the earth and the sky were close and near.  And the old hunger returned -- the terrible and obscure hunger that haunts and hurts Americans, and that makes us exiles at home and strangers wherever we go.

Later, Wolfe describes Gant (modeled on himself): for me, a portrait of the Tea Party voter in an especially depressing election year.  Watch the movement from contentment, which first appears to excuse Gant's political ignorance and apathy, to discontent to fantasy to -- the most brilliant move -- fantasy that "found extension in reality":

Yet, Eugene was no rebel.  He had no greater need for rebellion than have most Americans, which is none at all.  He was quite content with any system which might give him comfort, security, enough money to do as he liked, and freedom to think, eat, drink, love, read, and write what he chose.  And he did not care under what form of government he lived -- Republican, Democrat, Tory, Socialist, or Bolshevist -- if it could assure him these things.  He did not want to reform the world, or to make it a better place to live in: his whole conviction was that the world was full of pleasant places, enchanted places, if only he could find them.  The life around him was beginning to fetter and annoy him: he wanted to escape from it.  He felt sure things would be better elsewhere.  He always felt sure things would be better elsewhere.
         It was not his quality as a romantic to escape out of life, but into it.  He wanted no land of Make-believe: his fantasies found extension in reality, and he saw no reason to doubt that there really were 1,200 gods in Egypt, and that the centaur, the hippogriff, and the winged bull might all be found in their proper places.  He believed that there was magic in Byzantium, and genii stoppered up in wizards' bottles.

I stayed up late to finish the book, and I'm glad I did: another sleet storm hit around midnight, short but intense, just like the one that caught me today as I biked back home to the NIAS from Leiden.  On my slanted skylight window, the noise of the sleet is thunderously beautiful.  

Settled in and thinking

So what was the nature of my Rembrandt revelation?  Svetlana Alpers, in her famous book The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, argued that Dutch painting should be understood as describing the world as it is seen, rather than as imitating or alluding to the world (or texts, or language, or traditions).  She put together the northern European interest in seeing the world more clearly through telescope or microscope with the close attention to detail that appears in the earliest Dutch Madonnas and landscapes, and then lets the concern with seeing guide her through the paintings.  She was able to notice new details about the experience of seeing -- how, for instance, landscape artists like Ruisdael played with the placement of the viewer.  As the viewer of a Ruisdael landscape, where exactly are you standing?  It's not clear: perhaps a neighboring hilltop?  A low-hovering helicopter?  And she puts into words the marvelous feeling that many Dutch landscapes convey, the sense that there's a world beyond the picture frame, that the frame of the painting exists almost by accident, that it doesn't act so much as a window as it does a surface.              

And with the surface is where I started to see Rembrandt afresh at the Mauritshuis.  I've never had much patience with Rembrandt's meditative studies, especially the self-portraits.  (Dramatic corporate pictures like Nightwatch captivate me.) There are too many of these studies, they seem gimmicky, they're burdened with the weight of too many pretentious scholarly claims (the invention of the individual, etc.), they often convey a sense of self-pity that gets on my nerves (though not as much as the complacency of your standard Rubens portrait).  This 1669 example above, in fact, fit all these categories, and when I first entered the room I walked by it without stopping.  I went instead toward his Homerus, kitty-corner to the self-portrait.

For many minutes (was it Robert Hughes who said you need to look at a painting for an hour to get a sense of it?) I just couldn't find my way in.  Homerus is a brown study, "rich with pathos" you might say.  I was about to give up: and then I caught something that doesn't show up on the tiny copy above, a sheen of almost sheer paint in broad vertical stripes on the right-hand side, almost invisible unless you look very closely.  I couldn't identify the color: brownish-black?  But immediately it struck me as a much subtler version of the dramatic stripy effects in Francis Bacon's Innocent X -- to the degree that I began to wonder whether Bacon's Study was as much a reaction to Rembrandt as to Velasquez.  There was something happening on that surface that, I thought, had nothing to do with the clichéd questing blind gaze of the figure.  But then (I thought in the next moment), the effect relates somehow to the subject of the painting: it's inches away, one can only ignore the figure by doing experiential violence to the work.  Perhaps simply virtuoso texture-creation?  Or something else: not the veil before the poet's blind eyes, exactly -- the near-evanescence of the effect made it impossible for me to interpret it as in representational terms -- but a gesture toward the cloudy distance that separates us from Homer, a gesture toward the impossibility of representing the distant past.
Re-energized and now curious, I turned to the self-portrait.  Again it eluded me: I felt impatient and bored.  Then I began to notice the red and ochre threads of paint in Rembrandt's grey hair--or rather, since I'd noticed them earlier, this time I started to think about them.  Ghosts of color, they rusted his head, combining with the black and grey patches in the pinkish face to create the effect of fleshy corrosion.  The theme is extended in the bloody scrapings of vermilion over the black waistcoat.  And here the astonishing mastery of paint, which never ceases to astonish, did the work stylization nearly always does: it distanced the pathos, made the painting a matter of surfaces rather than depth (the false depth that tends to self-dramatize both the subject and the viewer of the painting), re-made the work as something not to fall into but to reflect on, in the deepest sense of the word "reflect".    
I still have more to see in Rembrandt, but this was a major step.  Today I travel to the Franz Hals museum in Haarlem with the other NIAS fellows.  I hope to see more Ruisdaels and -- something I wouldn't have said before Saturday -- more Rembrandts.

Gerhard Richter

After a week of freezing cold and several inches of snow, it's raining today, and the serene view of trees outside my slanted office window, very slightly fogged from the heating unit just below it, recalls Gerhard Richter's blurred landscapes, like Troisdorf (1985):

    
I got a chance to see Vermeer's View of Delft at the Mauritshuis on Saturday, my favorite Vermeer, along with everything else in that famous collection.  It was about 22 or 24 degrees, too cold for your average tourist, I gather, because the galleries were nearly empty.
As happened to me most memorably in the MOMA Dada show, I had a revelation at the Mauritshuis, regarding Rembrandt.  More after the Five Minute Lecture downstairs.    

In the Netherlands

Blog silence is due to transition to the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study, where I'm basking in the literal glow of the sun setting over the North Sea coast and the metaphorical one of having time to myself to think and write.  They look after us very well here, and my colleagues are a fascinating, friendly bunch.